9/11
 What Was Israel's Role?Fox
News revelations point to an ominous conclusion

When
is American foreign policy going to start putting America first? The US
had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by vetoing a UN resolution
condemning violence on all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The
resolution condemned terrorism, no matter what the source, called for the
creation of a "monitoring mechanism" to prevent violence, denounced
executions without trial, and said the destruction of property must cease.
You gotta problem with that?

NEGROPONTE'S
VETO

This
administration does: John Negroponte, American ambassador to the UN, justified
the
US veto by averring that the resolution aimed to "isolate politically
one of the parties to the conflict through an attempt to throw the weight
of the Council behind the other party.'' The resolution, said Negroponte,
was unsatisfactory because it didn't specifically
mention "recent acts of terrorism'' against Israelis. Naturally, this
scuttled the whole thing, as it was intended to do.

THE
VICTIMOLOGICAL OLYMPICS

For
this argument, if carried on long enough, would lead to an infinite regression
of victimological examples: the pro-Arab bloc would insist on specifically
mentioning the supposedly accidental killing of five Palestinian children
by an Israeli booby-trap bomb planted near a school. This would be the cue
for the Israeli side to come up with a Hamas-Hizbollah atrocity that merits
inclusion  and, before you know it, we're all the way back to 1948
with the pro-Arabists demanding the inclusion ofthe massacre
at Deir Yassein, and, naturally, the Zionist bloc doing them one better
by moving for some mention of the Roman conquest and persecution
of the Jews.

THE
WAR AGAINST THE WORLD

The
US veto undermines the war effort, and makes the Americans seem as if they
are waging a war not only on Islam, but against the entire world on behalf
of Israel. After decades of trying to prove its bona fides as an honest
broker of peace in the region, it is the US that is effectively isolated.
The resolution was co-sponsored (or amended) by France and the Security
Council vote was 12-1, with Britain and Norway abstaining. Whatever credibility
the US had in the Arab world  very little, I'm afraid  was lost
with that one arrogant gesture. So much for the grand "coalition"
that Colin Powell has been building: the Israeli lobby in the US has demolished
it with a single blow.

THE
LAST LAUGH

Is
that the demonic laughter of the Mad Sheik I hear, chortling in his cave
at this act of American self-sabotage? It may be Osama bin Laden is not
long for this world. Yet he will die happy in the knowledge that the US
is sowing the seeds of his future warrior army, who will spring like Muslim
Myrmidons out of Palestine's
blood-soaked earth.

BATTLEGROUND
AMERICA

Speaking
of sabotage, the story of the gigantic Israeli spy operation in the US 
and its mysterious activities in the weeks prior to 9/11  continues
to amaze and shock even me. When I wrote, a few weeks ago, that the
detention of some 60 Israelis in connection with 9/11 was "ominous"
little did I realize just how much of an understatement that would turn
out to be. It is often said that, post-9/11, the US is going through what
the Israelis have had to endure for decades. The series of Fox News special
reports on Israeli penetration of US intelligence assets puts this insight
in an entirely new light. For it appears, from what we are learning, that
the struggle between two desert tribes in a far away land has truly been
brought home to the US: America, we are discovering to our horror, has become
a battleground for both sides in that ancient conflict.

ENDS
& MEANS

As
I related last week,
the first part of this astonishing four-part series by Fox News reporter Carl Cameron
presents credible evidence suggesting Israeli intelligence had foreknowledge
of the 9/11 attacks. The second and third parts show they had
the means to acquire this knowledge.
According to Cameron,

"Fox
News has learned that some American terrorist investigators fear certain
suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks may have managed to stay ahead of them,
by knowing who and when investigators are calling on the telephone."

ALL
ROADS LEAD TO AMDOCS

Cameron
takes us through an explanation of how and why virtually all telephone calls
in the US are billed by a single company, Amdocs
Ltd., which just happens to be headquartered in Israel. Chances are
that when you make a call, the record of the call and the billing is done
through Amdocs. With a virtual monopoly in the US, and tentacles worldwide,
Cameron reports that "it is virtually impossible to make a call on
normal phones without generating an Amdocs record of it." Amdocs denies
any wrongdoing, butsources tell Fox News that, in 1999,

"The
super secret national security agency, headquartered in northern Maryland,
issued what's called a Top Secret sensitive compartmentalized information
report, TS/SCI, warning that records of calls in the United States were
getting into foreign hands  in Israel, in particular."

SPIES
IN THE WOODWORK

It's
not that anyone is listening in on all these calls, but that these methods
are a way to know who is calling whom, when, and for how long  vital
information in and of itself. Cameron assures us that the White House and
the Pentagon are immune from such surveillance, but an
article in Insight, the magazine put out by the Washington Times, showed how Israeli intelligence had thoroughly penetrated
the communications system at the Clinton White House. According to co-authors
J. Michael Waller and Paul M. Rodriguez, writing in May of last year, the
FBI was

"Probing
an explosive foreign-espionage operation that could dwarf the other spy
scandals plaguing the U.S. government. Insight has learned that FBI counterintelligence
is tracking a daring operation to spy on high-level US officials by hacking
into supposedly secure telephone networks. The espionage was facilitated,
federal officials say, by lax telephone-security procedures at the White
House, State Department and other high-level government offices and by a
Justice Department unwillingness to seek an indictment against a suspect."

"The
espionage operation may have serious ramifications," wrote Waller and
Rodriguez,"because the FBI
has identified Israel as the culprit."

MONICA
TELLS ALL

Dozens
of officials confirmed the story, telling the authors of this fascinating
piece how the Israelis had managed to penetrate not only State Department
telephone lines, but also those in the White House, the Defense Department,
and the Justice Department. That the President knew this at the time is
beyond doubt; it came out, you'll remember, during l'affaire Lewinsky, when
Monica testified that, on March 29, 1997, she and Clinton were desecrating
the Oval Office and she specifically remembered it because, as the Starr
Report put it:

"He
suspected that a foreign embassy was tapping his telephones, and he proposed
cover stories. If ever questioned, she should say that the two of them were
just friends. If anyone ever asked about their phone sex, she should say
that they knew their calls were being monitored all along, and the phone
sex was just a put on."

LITTLE
DID THEY KNOW

That "foreign embassy" was the Israelis'. It is spooky,
in retrospect, to read the comments of the American intelligence and law
enforcement officials who sourced this pioneering Insight piece (which, for some reason, is no longer available on their
website but is still available, thanks
to the miracle of Google). "It's a huge security nightmare,"
said one senior US official. "The implications are severe," another
unnamed official chimed in."We're
not even sure we know the extent of it," said a third high-ranking
intelligence official. "All I can tell you is that we think we know
how it was done. That alone is serious enough, but it's the unknown that
has such deep consequences."

OUT
OF THE MURK

Ah,
but the deepness of these consequences is just beginning to be known. As
the Fox News revelations make all too clear, they are a lot deeper than
anyone, including Waller and Rodriguez, could possibly have imagined last
year. The picture that is beginning to emerge out of the murk is this: the
Israelis were watching the hijackers and/or their associates, and they very
possibly had access to a complete set of the conspirators' phone records,
if not direct access to the content of their conversations. In the months
prior to the attacks, the Israelis did indeed issue a warning of "massive"
terrorist attacks, but, in an effort to protect both their sources and methods,
their warning gave no details and was therefore practically useless.

THE
COMVERSE CONNECTION

The
third part of the Fox series
shows how the Israelis had access, not only to phone records, but also to
the wiretaps being conducted by US law enforcement agencies. This access
could have easily been provided, Cameron points out, by yet another hi-tech
Israeli communications company, Comverse,
which operates as practically a branch of the Israeli government, and enjoys
near monopolistic status here in the US.

When
you place a call, it goes through a complicated network of routers and switchers.
The way wiretapping works is that customized computers are linked to that
network via specialized software, and the system intercepts, records, and
stores wiretapped calls. But this system has a "back door" that
could have easily been opened by Israeli intelligence. Comverse maintains
a link to the wiretapping computers, on the grounds that it is necessary
for system "maintenance." Over the opposition of some patriotic
law enforcement officers, this process was authorized by the 1994 Communications
Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). But that wasn't the end of it.
According to Fox News,

"Attorney
General John Ashcroft andFBI Director Robert Mueller were both warned
Oct. 18 in a hand-delivered letter from 15 local, state and federal law
enforcementofficials, who complained
that 'law enforcement's currentelectronic
surveillance capabilities are less effective today than theywere at the time CALEA was enacted.'"

ASHCROFT'S
COMPLICITY

But
Ashcroft is too busy rounding up Arabs and closing down their organizations
to worry about the wholesale penetration of our communications system 
including "secure" networks at the White House, the Defense Department,
and elsewhere  by our wonderful allies, the Israelis. Cameron cites
several unnamed law enforcement agents  concerned about the ominous
implications of the Israeli penetration in light of 9/11  who say
that even raising the issue is "career suicide."

I
HOPE YOU'RE SITTING DOWN

Okay,
so the Israelis have the phone lines over at the White House, the Defense
Department, the Justice Department, and, for all we know, your local dogcatcher's
office bugged to the max. So they have the capability to know where and
when practically every phone call in the US, and large sections of the rest
of the world, is made, and to whom. As fantastic as it sounds, given the
advance of technology and the reputation of the Mossad, I'm willing to believe
it. What's really alarming, however, is that, as Cameron reports:

"Ona number of cases, suspects that they had sought to wiretap and surveyimmediately changed their telecommunications
processes. They startedacting much
differently as soon as those supposedly secret wiretaps wentinto place."

BEYOND
THE BEGUINE

The
implications of this stunning news go far beyond my original contention:
that the Israelis had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and simply failed
to let us know the details. For it all depends on the intended target of
the wiretaps: was it the Israelis, or Bin Laden's agents? If the former
were acting differently after wiretaps were put in place, it means only
that the Israelis were using their sources and methods to protect their
own: if the latter, it means the Israelis were using their sources and methods
to protect the Bin Ladenites. That is a possibility no one  including
me  wants to contemplate, and, in all truthfulness, I must confess
I cannot believe it. I am forced to concede, however, that, given what we
now know, it is possible. Until and unless the government comes clean, we
won't know for sure.

INVESTIGATE
THE ISRAELI CONNECTION

At
the end of his second report, Carl Cameron remarked to Brit Hume that the
question of the Israeli connection to 9/11 "came up in the select intelligence
committee on Capitol Hill today," and"they intend to look into what we reported
last night." Naturally, all this is occurring in secret, with the likelihood
of a cover-up all but certain. What is needed is a public investigation, and full disclosure of the Israeli role, if
any, in 9/11.

WHERE
IS THE MEDIA?

That,
of course, is the role of the media  and, in this regard, it is interesting
to note that Cameron's explosive investigation has not been picked up by
a single news outlet, as far as I know (although I would be happy to be
proved wrong) or discussed by a single "mainstream" columnist.
Yet Fox News is hardly a marginal new source. In a business where scandal
and especially spy stories are hot, you would think that a story like this,
with its tie-in to 9/11, would have the other networks and the major media
falling all over themselves to get a piece of the action. But not this time,
at least so far.

FAN
MAIL FROM SOME CRANKY FLOUNDER

It's
funny, but when I wrote my first column on this subject, I got a whole bunch
of nutball letters from anti-Semitic cranks who told me that "the Jews"
would never let me get away with it, and that I am now a "marked man."
This story, wrote one correspondent, "will go nowhere," because
"the Jews" control the media, blah blah blah.I laughed, reading these perfervid notes, most of them WRITTEN IN
ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, wondering at the infinite capacity of people to fit
reality into ideological categories rather than the other way 'round. After
all, the mere fact that the story was broadcast on Fox News, a major media
organization, appears to contradict the self-evidently absurd thesis that
the "Elders of Zion," sitting in a control room somewhere, determine
what news we're allowed to read.

THE
ANTI-SEMITIC FALLACY

I
can only hope, for Mr. Cameron's sake, that what amounts to "career
suicide" in law enforcement doesn't hold true at Fox News. Israel certainly
has many vocal and very active supporters, who are quick to make their opinions
known. But it is false to posit a "Jewish-controlled" media, no
matter what the ethnicity or political persuasion of editors, owners, or
whatever: these media companies are beholden to their shareholders, and
to the market. Reporting the news is an intensely competitive business:
there is no way to enforce an embargo on certain information, not in this
day and age. There is no "Jewish conspiracy"  only the machinations
of a particular foreign government and its uncritical supporters in this
country, who span the ethnic and religious as well as the political spectrum.

THE
TRUTH, AT LAST

It
is too soon to say whether or not this story has "legs," as they
say, and is going anywhere soon. But one thing's for sure: Fox News has
blown the mystery of 9/11 wide open. This isn't going to just go away. On
September 11, the American people looked on in disbelief at the sight of
not only the World Trade Center going down but the Pentagon  the Pentagon, fer chrissake!  under attack
and apparently defenseless. My first thought, at any rate, was: How could this happen? With these latest
surprising developments  pointing to an ambiguous Israeli role, at
best, in all this  I fear we are just beginning to discover the answer
to that question.

Please Support Antiwar.com

A contribution
of $25 or more gets you a copy of Justin Raimondo's Into the Bosnian Quagmire:
The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans, a 60-page booklet packed
with the kind of intellectual ammunition you need to fight the lies being put
out by this administration and its allies in Congress. And now, for a limited
time, donors of $50 or more receive a copy of Ronald Radosh's classic study
of the Old Right conservatives, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative
Critics of American Globalism. Send contributions to